"Both cars were nothing but twisted and destroyed metal," Coryell wrote in a post he shared with friends on Facebook. "Pebbled glass was spread everywhere and the highway was painted with fluids; it had been an explosive collision."

Coryell and Kinsey rushed onto the scene, pulling off their helmets, and saw that occupants of both cars were trapped.

Coryell located a young mother with two children who was driving one of the vehicles. She was crushed between the steering column and the driver's set, he said.

"She was bleeding and barely conscious but screaming about her children as I leaned in the car to hold her hand..." Coryell wrote.

Kinsey, meanwhile, tended to her son, who was unconscious. He kept the boy's head and neck straight so he could breathe.

Coryell said the woman's daughter was dazed and had thrown up, but didn't appear to be as severely injured as her mother and brother.

He focused his attention on the mother. "The trapped mother screamed she couldn't breathe and several times grew quiet and I was afraid I was losing her," Coryell wrote in his post. "But I squeezed her hand and asked her to be there for her kids and tried to pass the life force through our clasped hands to her heart."

All of the occupants were extricated from the vehicles within a half an hour of their arrival, the report said.

Coryell said he saw emergency responders remove the mother with steel-cutting saws after about 15 or 20 "agonizing" minutes. She and her two children were taken to Upstate University Hospital by helicopters, police told Coryell.

Coryell spoke with police officers again on Monday. They told him that the boy had an operation overnight and was still in critical condition. The mother and daughter were in better shape, the officer told Coryell.

The driver of the other vehicle died at the scene of the accident, Coryell and police have reported. An officer told Coryell that a female passenger in that vehicle had two broken legs as a result of the crash.

Police have not provided additional information about the crash, or the names of those involved.

Coryell said he was relieved to hear from police, especially to hear that the mother had survived.

He was somber speaking of the crash. He and Kinsey had spent a beautiful day in Ithaca. They ate lunch in the Commons and enjoyed a cup of coffee on the way out of town.

Then, suddenly, they were in the midst of the most devastating scene Coryell said he'd seen in his life.

"Shortly after, we were cleared to leave and we rode back to Syracuse with the sobering reminder that in a slow-motion second everything can change," he wrote on Facebook. "Ride safe, my girls and family and all friends, for Christ's sake ride safe."